Perspectives and Instruments of Corporate Citizenship

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,1, Reutlingen University (ESB Business School), language: English, abstract: In recent years, the term Corporate Citizenship became more famous and was used as common vocabulary. However, there is quite a huge discussion and confusion about the term and no general definition exists. Thus, this paper concentrates on the term 'Corporate Citizenship' and discusses the emergence of the terminology. It introduces different perspectives on how to define Corporate Citizenship, mainly the limited view, the equal view and the extended view of Corporate Citizenship. It also discusses and demonstrates some downsides and weaknesses of these perspectives. Additionally, the paper introduces the concept of Global Business Citizenship as contrast to the approaches previously explained. To get a practical approach as well, the paper takes a closer look on how corporations can implement Corporate Citizenship by introducing several instruments. In order to top the understanding of Corporate Citizenship off, the paper finally focuses on the Top 100 Corporate Citizens judged by the CR Magazine. It looks at the different categories and data elements of the Corporate Citizenship Lists Methodology in order to broaden the knowledge about the different parts of Corporate Citizenship and to get a better understanding of what can be expected nowadays from firms.